Individual counseling

What people bring

Often it is something specific: a bereavement, a job that has become unbearable, a relationship that ended, a diagnosis. Sometimes it is vaguer — a sense of being permanently behind, or of having stopped noticing your own life while managing everyone else’s.

Common themes include:

• Anxiety, and the decisions it quietly makes for you
• Low mood that has outlasted its cause
• Grief, including losses that others consider settled
• Life transitions — career, health, family, retirement
• Shame, and the parts of your history you have not said out loud
• Difficulty setting limits with the people closest to you

How the work goes

Laura is an active participant rather than a silent one. She asks questions, reflects back what she notices, and shares resources when they are genuinely relevant. The direction is yours; she is not working to a curriculum.

Much of individual work turns out to be about accepting the position you are actually in before deciding what to change. That is not resignation. It is usually the thing that makes change possible.

Older teens

Laura works with older teenagers as well as adults, from seventeen upwards. For a young person, the useful thing is often having one adult in their week who is not grading them, employing them or raising them — somewhere to be uncertain without it becoming a family conversation.

Below seventeen she is not the right person, and would rather say so on this page than at the end of a first phone call.

Whether it is worth starting

People frequently wait until things are severe, on the grounds that their difficulty is not serious enough to take up a therapist’s time. It is a reasonable instinct and generally a mistake. If something has been on your mind long enough that you are reading this page, that is enough to have a first conversation about.